PASSIONTIDE is well served (for want of programmes actually referring to the Christian religion) by BBC1’s screening of Disney+’s Dropout (from Tuesday 19 February) as a penitential spotlight on the depths of human deceit, greed, and cupidity. Its many glossy episodes tell the true, although probably souped-up, story of Elizabeth Holmes: brilliant, charismatic, gorgeous, and driven by overweening ambition.

This inexorable moral descent, US-style, starts with fanatical application and hard work, and the breakthrough big idea on which her fortune will be built. Scared of needles and appalled by the preventable deaths caused by lack of an early diagnosis, she determines to produce a simple machine that will, from a single drop of blood, make hundreds of tests.

It’s a mission to help people, to change the work for good — and she fires up wealthy supporters to back her with start-up millions to build a crack team of visionary scientists. Her charisma is exactly what people want to see — a beautiful young woman challenging the grey suits of corporate biotech, proof that America is great — and she persuades more and more famous names to endorse her and supply huge financial backing.

Unfortunately, it’s all built on lies. Their machine simply doesn’t work; when eventually rolled out to the in-store “wellness centres” that will revolutionise healthcare, it’s actually a competitor’s, dishonestly pirated and providing lethally inaccurate results. The company morphs inexorably from social vision to paranoid secrecy, brutal security. She becomes cruel and vindictive, sacking, ruining, and destroying loyal colleagues: everything is sacrificed on the altar of ruthless ambition. Hollowed out, she presents an ever brighter exterior, more and more a brittle shell to hide a void of terror. One immediate moral triumph is that it cauterises any envy that we might have for the billionaire lifestyle of private jets and cut-throat business deals.

Ms Holmes’s story — rather than delay becoming rich, she dropped out of Stanford — provides a wry comment on Is University Really Worth It? (BBC2, Monday 11 March). The comedian and former English teacher Geoff Norcott challenged the ambition that he had fostered in his own students — and found today’s UK higher education sadly lacking. His critical thesis chimed with our Government’s: the purpose of a degree is make you wealthier.

How appalling, I thought. Whatever happened to liberal universities, and the pursuit of knowledge to broaden every horizon? But, as we heard about today’s actual reality — online lectures, little face time with tutors, the business model that crams in fee-paying students and cuts unprofitable courses — I began to change my mind. I should have trained as a plumber.

Thank heaven for the series Saving Lives at Sea in World War II (BBC2, Tuesdays) and its inspiring evidence of heroic service, as the RNLI crew willingly put themselves at mortal risk to help save others.